Ether (ETH) prices skyrocketed to a new all-time high on Wednesday on the back of positive news from the European Investment Bank.
Ether has climbed to $2,709 early during trading in Asia on Wednesday, marking a new peak price for the asset, according to CoinGecko.
The crypto metrics provider reports a gain of 7% over the past 24 hours, and 15.7% over the past seven days for the world’s second-largest digital asset by market capitalization. The move has pushed the ETH market cap to a record $312 billion.
While there are a range of factors propelling Ether’s price, Reuters today attributed it to the news that the European Investment Bank is launching a “digital bond” sale using the Ethereum network.
The EIB is issuing a two-year 100-million-euro ($120.8 million) digital bond, with the sale to be led by Goldman Sachs, Banco Santander and Societe Generale, according to analysts at Bloomberg.
On Friday, Societe Generale announced that its subsidiary, Societe Generale SFH, had issued a 100-million-euro bond as a security token on the public Ethereum blockchain. It was awarded the top triple-A rating by Moody’s and Fitch.
Danny Kim, head of revenue at crypto broker SFOX, told Reuters that the news has demonstrated a bullish institutional use case for Ethereum, adding that exchange balances are also decreasing, which adds m to the bull case:
“The amount of Ethereum sitting on exchanges continues to drop lower and has been the lowest in the past year. With less supply on exchange available, there’s less likely a chance of a major sell-off.”
As reported by Cointelegraph, a revival in DeFi-related protocols and tokens, coupled with a fall in gas prices, could also be driving momentum. At the time of writing, the average transaction price on the network had fallen to $10.73, according to BitInfoCharts.
Popular crypto analyst Altcoin Sherpa, meanwhile, predicted that ETH would continue to outperform Bitcoin (BTC) in the coming weeks, targeting a price of $3,000.